


Victories Worse Than Defeat (Things That Go to Make Up a Life Remix)

by SegaBarrett



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Remix 2014, Remix Redux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:45:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1549388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dudley finds things that he didn't know he knew, didn't remember that he recalled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Victories Worse Than Defeat (Things That Go to Make Up a Life Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SecondSilk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondSilk/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Victories Worse Than Defeat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/88730) by [SecondSilk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondSilk/pseuds/SecondSilk). 



> Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter and I make no money from this. 
> 
> A/N: Thank you to my beta, M.G. Imperial!

Dudley finds ways to pass the time in hiding. Back home at Privet Drive, he had spent his days with his friends – at least, he’d thought of them as such. Now they blend into one, into a faceless gray blob of “people he once knew”. Like there’s a wall separating then and now, the same kind of wall that Dudley imagines separates the living from the dead.

He’s taken up reading, however slow going it is at first, and when he gets frustrated he goes looking through the things they brought with them from the old house. 

He is surprised when he comes across a blue-bound photo album that he has never seen before. Some part of him whispers in his ear not to show it to his parents, that this is something he should look at alone. But it’s not the thrill of the forbidden that he’d had in years prior, passing around dirty magazines at Smeltings. It’s like he’s in the presence of something sacred and threatened. 

He flips open the first page and sees some yellowed photographs of people he doesn’t recognize. There are two young girls, a man and a woman standing behind them. All are smiling proudly. 

There’s something familiar in the one girl’s eyes, the taller one with brown hair instead of red, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. It’s as if he’s seen those eyes before but not in real life, only in a dream that he can’t remember but which sits below the surface. 

“You found her.”

There’s a voice behind him, and he tries to jump up and conceal the book at the same time, but getting to his feet takes a little longer than he would have liked. His mother is standing behind him with her hand on her hip and her lips pursed together, looking less at him and more at the wall she’s been complaining about since they arrived; it’s too beige, she says.

“What?” Dudley asks. He tries to hide the book behind his back – last year he would have been big enough to do so with ease. He feels a pang of disgust at himself as he remembers it, not because of the weight but because of the amount of time he had spent with his fingers in his ears. He’d been blissfully oblivious to the outside world until it had hit him in that wave of cold, the realization of things such as _We’ve never had an actual conversation. Harry and that godfather of his, those letters they write…_ He’d pictured them writing about real things, things with edges and gashes and things that bled out while his conversations with his parents never went past things that could be boiled down to one syllable – want, get, have.

“That is… it’s an album of Lily and I, when we were growing up.”

Dudley never knew his grandparents. They had been long dead by the time that he was born. His mother hadn’t mentioned them other than briefly, usually when connected to something meaningless like a recipe or a place they used to go on holiday. His Aunt Lily had never factored into these remembrances, there yet not there.

Dudley flips the album back open.

“What was it like?”

Petunia doesn’t answer, not at first. Dudley figures that she doesn’t understand what it is that he’s asking, as he sets another page to the side and finds one with his mother, so much younger, standing by a little pink bike. 

“Having a sister?” he prompts a moment later. He feels strangely cheated out of the experience. He and Harry had grown up together, but had moved into two different worlds. He can remember a moment, however, one so fleeting that he may have just imagined it after all.

****

There had been a moment when Dudley had been four or five – tiny by Dudley standards but already pudgy, especially in comparison to his cousin. It had been late at night and Harry had been sleeping in the bed across the room. Dudley had shook him awake and whispered something about going out to fight ghosts. They were going to go downstairs and fight ghosts together. Harry had, sleepily, agreed, and they’d opened the door and went downstairs. Dudley had at some point acquired the plunger from the bathroom and Harry had a random broom that had been sitting in a closet somewhere.

They had started running around, making noises that sounded vaguely like guns – the kinds of guns that you would use to fight ghosts, Dudley figures. Out of nowhere he had noticed the broom in mid-air, hovering above the floor.

His mouth had opened in sheer fascination and awe.

“Harry!” he had yelped. “How did you do that?”

“I… don’t know,” Harry had squeaked

“That’s so cool! Can you teach me to do it?”

That had been the moment when his mother had appeared at the bottom of the stairs, her lips pursed. 

All he remembered after that was yelling. He and Harry hadn’t shared a room after that. He had asked questions at first, but they had plied him with things, with gifts and attention, until he stopped asking and just assumed that that was the way it should be.

***

“We were friends,” he whispers now, looking up at his mother. “We used to be friends.”

She’s staring at him.

“What are you talking about?” she asks, and he grits his teeth, looking down at the pictures. “Why did you hate her? I mean she’s just… different.”

Harry had just been different. 

“Well, I mean, Diddykins…”

“Don’t call me that,” Dudley murmurs, looking down. It’s a way to change the subject, to defeat the point. To win. 

“She was a freak. We’re normal people here, Dudley. I think it’s just moving and all of this that has gotten you so upset. Why don’t we go do something else?”

“We haven’t ever been normal.”

 

***

Dudley was nine and had everything he had ever wanted. He had a new toy car – he’d broken the old one shortly after receiving it, and he had a big cake that he’d brought up to his room. He had plenty of friends, a whole gang of them. Kids wanted to be around Dudley, or at least were afraid not to be on his side.

Sometimes he forgot that Harry even lived with them, quiet as he was in his cupboard under the stairs. He’d slip by sometimes and wonder what he was even doing down there, but it’d be only a half-thought, something he wouldn’t allow himself to wonder because they weren’t the same, the two of them. There was something different, something bad about his cousin and his parents were protecting him by making sure that he didn’t catch it too, whatever it was. Because if they didn’t protect him from it, he’d be the one getting beat up at school, getting chased to the roof, getting – how had Harry gotten off the roof? Or on to the roof? The memory was already playing tricks on him even then, as memories about his cousin had a tendency to do.

Dudley had pressed his ear up against the door that separated them, the door that separated the tiny cupboard from everything else. It hadn’t been meant as a living space… what had it been meant for? What had been there before it held a living person? Mops, brooms? Moth balls, spiders? What did it hold now?

Dudley listened. He let himself wonder what Harry was doing in there before he snapped back out of it. It didn’t do to dwell, to wonder. He couldn’t picture either of his parents ever wondering about much of anything, and they were just fine. Their only goal in life had been to provide for their Diddykins, and so everything had worked out just about all right.

***

He keeps flipping through the pages, as if they could give him some kind of answer, as if some sort of alternate universe had been kept within them. What if he had been the one, he wonders, what if he had been the one to receive the letter?

He would have been a freak in his parents’ eyes, wouldn’t he? He would have been an outcast, he would have been…

And yet he remembers the utter lack of fear in Harry’s eyes, the solidity of him. The way he had spoken, however briefly, of friends. Real friends, not the faceless gang that Dudley kept. He hasn’t told a single one of them where he has gone, and he’s quite sure not a single one of them misses him, not Piers or Malcolm or any of the others. 

He realizes that he doesn’t want them to. How much did he ever know about any of them, anyway? He can’t recall their parents’ names, what they were afraid of, anything any of them were ever good at. He feels like he knows more about the wispy bits of news he’d hear Harry exchanging with his parents, defending Ron and Hermione – Ron with the weird parents who couldn’t figure out a telephone and smart Hermione who apparently had dentist parents.

The friends that his cousin loves. The ones who, he is quite sure, will be accompanying him on this crazy suicidal quest.

He wishes he had something he’d be willing to go on a crazy suicidal quest for.

Dudley flips open to the last page of the pictures. They’re different. It’s a picture of his Aunt Lily, but she’s not stuck to the photo, not dead. She’s moving around in the photo, waving frantically, standing in front of some huge feathered-bird thing that Dudley couldn’t identify if he tried. In the next slot is a crumbled piece of paper that looks like it was written not in pen but some kind of elongated quill out of one of those old movies – it reads: _Hi Tuney! Having so much fun at Hogwarts. I hope you aren’t still cross. I miss you, wish you were here too – have so much to tell you when I get home. Love always, Lily._

Dudley looks up at his mother and closes the album without another word.

It’s another world.


End file.
